Yes, it’s that crazy time of the year again, when the city of San Francisco turns red – it’s Oracle Open World (OOW) 2016! If you’re planning on going this year, I hope you have your hotel room booked, because they disappear very, VERY quickly!

So some unknowing fool gave me full access to a fridge of Starbucks caffeinated beverages, which should be against the law in this fine country. Needless to say, my ability to type approximately 180wpm has offered me the opportunity to catch up and blog about what it’s like almost a month in employed with Delphix.

I’m back home from Oracle OpenWorld 2015. My overall feeling for this year was evolution, not revolution. We got newer versions of some products, like APEX, WebLogic, SOA Suite and Oracle Forms, just before the conference. We got previews of new versions of products, like Oracle Database 12cR2 during the conference, which we might get next year.

Of course, there was a heavy emphasis on cloud, but the difference between this year and previous years was some of the product are now generally available (GA), so it’s possible to trial or buy them. In previous years, you could only use some of the cloud products if you were “special”.

I was awake at 04:30, about 15 minutes before my alarm and wake-up call. That reduced the levels of panic normally associated with such an early start. I dropped off my key-card with the guy on the hotel check-out and got into the waiting car and off I went.

I think this was the first time I’ve ever left San Francisco via the domestic terminal. Getting the bags checked in and doing security was pretty straight forward, so I sat down with about 90 minutes spare before the flight.

The flight to Newark was event free, but the guy on the arrival gate at Newark was a complete dick. As we walked through, he said, “Welcome to Boston”, which I can only assume was meant to be a joke. Yeah. Great joke. Idiot!

Wednesday started early. I was invited over to breakfast with the Dbvisit crew, which was a great start to the day. I met Arjen years ago and the Dbvisit team have continued to be good people ever since. It’s always good when I get to meet up with them!

The day started in the normal way, with a quick blog post about the previous day and a visit to the gym.

The original plan for the day was to hit the demo grounds again. I popped into OakTable World for the quick chat with a few folks and ended up staying for quite while. I watched some of the Ted-style talks, specifically Tim Gorman, Jonathan Lewis and Martin Klier. I then got chatting to some folks outside, before heading back in to see Gwen Shapira do a session on Kafka.

You might have guessed from my last post, I was feeling a little bit deflated (insert fat joke here) yesterday morning.

I cheered myself up by spending the day in my hotel room doing installations.

On Friday evening the new Fusion Middleware 12.2.1 stack was released, so spent the day playing with it. I’ve written some articles, but they will need some tidying up when I get home. There are definitely some things I want to change.